If you know kung fu, how do you know it? In the 1999 film The Matrix, the protagonist Neo has martial arts instantly uploaded into his brain. ‘I know kung fu’, he states, definitively, before fighting malign algorithms in the virtual reality of the Matrix. As I develop a new project exploring the educational potential of the Metaverse, I’m reminded of this scene. This blog post focuses on the educational potential and pitfalls of the Metaverse – that is, the persistent, decentralised, shared virtual spaces where users have a sense of presence, often using VR or AR technologies. The traditional discourse invites you to imagine students visiting Machu Picchu or Mars, or handling a virtual model heart, interacting viscerally with these environments. The chance to transcend physical and temporal constraints is undeniably compelling.
The Metaverse holds exciting potential for education, but this domain remains largely underexplored as a field of educational research. Could new immersive technologies lead to new educational realities where we can ‘know kung fu’ instantaneously? Or might the educational promise lie elsewhere? Alternatively, might new technologies simply help reproduce the same old enduring educational models of schooling and university? What are the implications for children and young people? My project, Virtual Ecologies of Learning, maps existing research on, and examples of, youth-led educational practice in Metaverse contexts. This mapping will lead to a pilot of a youth-led educational encounter in a Metaverse space. The whole process is being captured ethnographically.
However, my early explorations of existing educational spaces in the Metaverse have left me conflicted. Rather than embracing new possibilities for more democratic approaches to education, framed by an infinite range of contexts (think, for example, of an education ‘commons’ where learners can explore whatever subjects or competencies they like, when they like, situated, for instance, on a virtual beach), most examples simply recreate old educational architectures – the Victorian classroom, the 1950s American high school, the traditional university campus or lecture hall. Even when the scenery changes, the underlying pedagogical structures stay the same. A recent Meta advertisement shows a grandmother and granddaughter learning astronomy on an alien planet, only for the grandmother to ask if this helps with writing a paper for her teacher. A traditional assessment endures as the sum of this cosmically enriched experience. Rather than reimagining learning, some visions of the Metaverse promise only a high-tech means of reproducing the status quo.
